' ' Perfect Enough To Break ' '

Her Static Plea

Bucky's POV

It had been weeks. Weeks of chasing down dead ends, turning over every rock, hitting walls so high and solid I could feel them grinding my teeth down every time I slammed into them.

And somewhere along the way—quietly, carefully—the others started letting go.

I noticed it in the little things. Natasha switching the monitors in the briefing room over to a new mission that had nothing to do with HYDRA. Steve cutting conversations short whenever I pressed too hard. Sam not even bringing it up anymore, like it was safer to let me burn myself out than keep the fire going. Even Fury—he'd stopped checking in. Stopped feeding me scraps of intel.

They didn't say it, but I felt it. She's gone. Move on.

I couldn't.

That night, I stormed back to my room after another dead lead, the silence of the compound pressing heavy against my skin. My hands still itched with the ghost of a fight that hadn't happened. My chest still burned like I'd run ten miles straight into nothing.

I slammed the door shut, pacing once, twice, before I dropped into the chair by the desk. I wanted to put my fist through the wall. Instead, I just sat there, rubbing the heel of my hand over my face, trying not to think about her.

And that's when I saw it.

The USB. Small, silver. Fury had handed it to me back when they pulled her off the medbay table—weeks ago. He'd said something about "archived files," about "knowing what you're dealing with." I hadn't touched it since. Couldn't.

But now... my eyes locked on it like it was bait dangling in front of a starving animal. My pulse jumped. My fingers twitched against my knee.

I shouldn't. I knew I shouldn't.

If Fury hadn't told me to look, then maybe I wasn't meant to. Maybe there was a reason it had just been sitting here, gathering dust, waiting.

But my hand moved before I could stop it.

The USB was cold against my fingers as I slid it into the port. The laptop's screen flickered, a black window opening. Static filled my ears first—sharp, grating, broken by patches of silence. For a second, I thought it was dead. Just some corrupted file that had survived too long.

Then—

"Twenty-third of May."

Pierce's voice.

My chest locked tight. That date—I knew it. The day after I got out.

"I don't know how he got out. I don't know where he went."

Sova... Her voice. But not the one I knew—this one was thinner, trembling, stripped of every wall she usually wore like armor.

A crack split through the recording. A fist.

She gasped, choked. "I don't know—! I swear, I don't know!"

My metal hand curled into a fist so tight the metal groaned.

"Where would he go?" Pierce's tone was calm. Too calm. Like he enjoyed this. Like this was a sick hobby of his.

"I don't—" The words broke, cut off by another blow. Her body hit the restraints hard. She coughed, wheezed, but still forced out, "I don't know!"

The scrape of leather tightening.

"No—no, please don't—" Her voice fractured, frantic, desperate. "I'll talk, I'll—don't put me in the chair, please!—"

A machine whirred to life. High-pitched. Cold. I knew that machine. the same machine that erased my memories of Steve. Of the forties.

Her scream tore through the speakers.

I jerked back from the table, clutching my head, pressing my palms against my ears like I could block it out. But the sound still clawed through, filling the room, filling me.

"You can stop this," Pierce said. "Just tell me where he'd run."

"I don't know—I didn't open the doors, I didn't—please, I swear—"

The machine surged again. She screamed until her voice cracked. but she had open the doors. she had helped me. and still she denied it. even when pierce told her she could stop it.

My chest burned. my jaw clenching. my hand over my mouth.

Then came a hiss. A syringe.

Her pleading turned broken. "No—no, don't—"

The muffled cry that followed made me jerk my head to the side closing my eyes as if I could somehow unhear it. Because the way that hurt me was excruciating. Excruciating to the point where I held my forearm with my hand and my grip tightened. I needed something to hold onto. it was too painful not to.  Then her words slurred, heavy. Drugged.

"I... didn't... do anything..."

A strike cut her off. Her cry was small, weak. Not her.

"You did well to stay," Pierce's voice was almost warm almost of approval. "You know what would have happened if you'd left with him."

Silence. Her shallow breathing. The faint buzz of electricity in the room.

Then the scrape of metal. Restraints shifting. The machine whining louder, winding up.

Her panic sharpened, tearing through the fog. "No, no, please—don't—don't put me in there—"

And then the sound swallowed her.

The reconditioning chair roared to life, a deafening mechanical whirl, filling every crack in the recording. For twenty long seconds, it drowned out her voice entirely, her screams muted under the sheer violence of the machine's power.

When it shut down, the silence was worse than the noise.

And then her voice came, hollow, empty, blank.

"What are my commands?"

The audio cut.

I staggered back, shaking my head hard, hands digging into my hair as if I could rip the sound out of me. My chest burned. My throat closed. I turned away from the screen though there was nothing else to look at, breath ragged like I'd just come out of a fight.

She'd begged. She'd cried. She'd been abused and I couldn't do anything. maybe I could've stopped it...

It should've been me in that chair.